Adaptive bitrate streaming is a technique used in streaming media data (such as video, audio, and other multimedia data) over a communication network. Examples of adaptive bitrate streaming techniques include Adobe Dynamic Streaming for Flash, Apple Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Adaptive Streaming, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). DASH is a streaming standard supporting adaptive streaming using HTTP. Some adaptive bit rate streaming techniques, such as DASH, make use of an initialization segment as part of a rate adaptation mechanism. A media presentation (i.e., media content data) may be divided into one or more periods. Each period may include an initialization segment and one or more media segments. The initialization segment may contain metadata used by the media segments in a representation. The metadata may include metadata needed to initialize the media content, for example, sample descriptors, tractor descriptors, and digital rights management (DRM)-related information. The initialization segment may be sent together with and/or separately from the media segments.
Streamed media content data is received and rendered by a client application, such as a streaming media client of a receiving communication device. When a client application first requests media content, the client application typically receives or retrieves a new initialization segment. The client application may then perform a reconfiguration using information in the initialization segment. However, in some cases, an initialization segment associated with newly requested media content may be substantially similar or functionally similar to a previously requested initialization segment, causing both communication bandwidth and client application processing cycles to be used unnecessarily.